by the Indians in a clearing near his cabin in Adams County, and was
hurried off before his family knew that anything had happened. They
roused the neighborhood, and the Indians were hotly pursued, but they
got away with their prisoner, and made swiftly off to Upper Sandusky,
where they forced him to run the gantlet. He was a heavy man, not fleet
of foot, and he was terribly beaten; but he got through alive, and at
Detroit a British officer ransomed him for a hundred dollars. By that
time prisoners must have been getting cheap: it was perhaps more and
more difficult to hold them.
Two boys, John Johnson, thirteen years old, and Henry Johnson, eleven,
were captured in 1788 near their home at Beach Bottom in Monroe County.
They were cracking nuts in the woods, and when the Indians came upon
them the boys thought that they were two of their neighbors. They were
seized and hurried away, one Indian going before and one following the
boys, who told them their father treated them badly, and tried to make
their captors believe they were glad to be leaving home. The Indians
spent the day in a vain attempt to steal horses, and stopped to pass
the night only four miles from the place where they had taken the boys.
After supper they lay down with the prisoners between them, and when
they supposed the boys were asleep one of the Indians went and stretched
himself on the other side of the fire. Presently he began snoring, and
John rose, cocked one of the guns, and left it with Henry aimed at this
Indian’s head, while he took his station with a tomahawk held over the
head of the other. Henry fired and John struck at the same time; neither
Indian was killed at once, but both were too badly hurt to prevent the
boys’ escape, and the brothers found their way to the settlement by
daybreak. The neighbors who returned to their camp with them found the
body of the Indian who had been tomahawked, but the other had vanished.
Years afterwards a skeleton with a gun was discovered in the woods,
where he must have crept after he was shot.
In the autumn of 1792 Samuel Davis and William Campbell set out from
Massie’s Station, now Manchester, to trap beaver on the Big Sandy. One
night as they lay asleep beside their camp fire they were roused by a
voice saying in broken English, “Come, come; get up, get up!” and they
woke to find themselves in the clutches of a large party of Indians
returning from a raid into Virginia. The Indians bound their captives
and started, driving before them a herd of stolen horses. They crossed
the Ohio country, and pushed on toward Sandusky, for they were Shawnees.
At night they tied each prisoner with buffalo thongs and made these fast
to the waist of two Indians, who lay down one on either side of him, and
quieted him with blows if he became restive. At daylight the captives
were untied, but they were warned that they would be instantly killed
if they attempted to escape. Davis was in dread of being burned at
Sandusky, and as the Indians, encumbered with their booty, made only
ten or twelve miles a day, the terror had full time to grow upon him. At
last one morning just before dawn he woke one of the Indians beside
him and asked to be untied; he was answered with a blow of the savage’s
fist. He waited a moment, and then woke the other guard, who lifted his
head, and seeing some of his people building a fire, released Davis.
It was still too dark for any of them to get a good shot at him if he
made a dash from their midst, and Davis decided to try for life and
liberty. He knocked a large warrior before him into the fire, bounded
over him, burst through the group around him, and before they could
seize their rifles, which were all stacked together, he had vanished in
the shadows of the forest. They followed him, whooping and yelling, but
none could draw a bead on him, and not a shot was fired. One Indian
was so near that Davis fancied he felt his grasp at times, but he fell
behind, and Davis kept on. When he had distanced them all, he stopped
to tear up his waistcoat, and wrap his feet, naked and bleeding from the
sharp stones which had cut them in his wild flight, and then hurried
on toward the Ohio. Three days without food or fire, in the cold of the
early winter, passed before he reached the river, eight or ten miles
below the mouth of the Scioto. He then saw a large boat coming down the
stream, but his troubles did not end with this joyful sight. One of
the dreadful facts of the dreadful time was the frequent deception of
boatmen by Indians and renegades who pretended to be escaping prisoners,
and who lured them to their destruction by piteous appeals for help. The
boatmen now refused to land for Davis; they told him they had heard
too many stories like his, and they kept on down the stream, while he
followed wearily along the shore. At last he entreated them to row in
a little nearer, so that he could swim out to them. They consented to
this, and he plunged into the icy water, and was taken on board just as
his strength was spent.
In 1782, John Alder, then a child of eight years, was captured in Wythe
County, Virginia, by a party of Min-goes, who at the same time wounded
and killed his brother. They already had two prisoners, Mrs. Martin, the
wife of a neighbor, and her little one four or five years old: it proved
troublesome, on their rapid march across the Ohio country to their
village on Mad River, and they tomahawked and scalped it. The next
morning little Alder was somewhat slow in rising from his breakfast
when bidden, and on the ground he saw the shadow of an arm with a lifted
tomahawk. He glanced upward and found an Indian standing over him,
who presently began to feel of Alder’s thick black hair. He afterwards
confessed that he had been about to kill him, but when he met his
pleasant smile he could not strike, and then he thought that a boy with
hair of that color would make a good Indian, and so spared him.
At the Mingo village Alder was made to run the gantlet between lines of
children armed with switches, but he was not much hurt, and he was now
taken into the tribe. He was given to a Mingo family, and the mother
washed him and dressed him in the Indian costume. They were kind to
him, but for a month he was very homesick, and used to go every day to a
large walnut tree near the town and cry for the friends and home he had
lost. After he had learned the Mingo language he began in time to be
more contented. He had no complaint to make of any of the family, except
one sister, who despised him as a prisoner, and treated him like a
slave. Another sister and her husband were his special friends, and he
relates that when he used to sit up with the Indians round their camp
fire, listening to their stories, he would sometimes drowse; then this
gentle sister and her husband would take him up in their arms and carry
him to bed, and he would hear them saying, “Poor fellow! We have sat up
too long for him, and he has fallen asleep on the cold ground.”
About a year after he was adopted, Alder met that poor mother, whose
little one the Indians had cruelly murdered before her eyes. “When she
saw me, she came smiling, and asked if it was me. I told her it was. She
asked me how I had been. I told her I had been very unwell, for I had
had fever and ague for a long time. So she took me off to a log, and
there we sat down; and she combed my head, and asked a great many
questions about how I lived, and if I didn’t want to see my mother and
little brothers. I told her I should be glad to see them, but never
expected to see them again. We took many a cry together, and when we
parted, took our last and final farewell, for I never saw her again.”
Alder always remained delicate, and could not thrive on the Indians’
fare of meat and hominy, with no bread or salt; of sugar and honey there
was plenty; but he missed the things he was used to at home. When he
grew older he was given a gun, and sent hunting, and whenever he came
back with game the Indians praised his skill and promised him he should
be a great hunter some day. He continued with them until the peace of
1795, which followed Wayne’s victory, and even then he stayed for a time
in the region where he had dwelt so long. He had married a squaw,
and had become a complete Indian, so that the first settlers in his
neighborhood had to teach him to speak English. But he did not live
happily with his Indian wife; they agreed to part, and then Alder
thought of going back to his own people. He reached the house of one of
his brothers in the neighborhood of his old home, one Sunday afternoon,
and found several of his brothers and sisters there, and his mother with
them. They could scarcely be persuaded that it was their son and brother
come back to them, and he had to tell them of some things that no one
else could know before they would believe him. His old, white-haired
mother whom he remembered in her youth with a “head as black as a crow,”
was the first to take him in her arms, and she said, as she wept over
him, “How you have grown! I dreamed that you had come to see me, but
you was a little _ornary_-looking fellow, and I would not own you for my
son; but now I find I was mistaken, that it is entirely the reverse, and
I am proud to own you for my son.”
[Illustration: Alder returns to his Family 141]
In 1792, Moses Hewit was taken near Neil’s Station, on the Little
Kanawha, by three Indians, who at once pushed off with him towards
Sandusky. They used him very kindly, and shared fully with him the wild
honey which they found in the bee trees, and invited him to take part in
their foot races and other sports. He found that he could outrun two of
them, and he resolved to try for his liberty, though he kept a cheerful
outside with them, and seemed contented with his lot. One day they left
him tied hand and foot and fastened to two small trees while they went
on a hunt, but he contrived to free himself, and made his escape with
their whole stock of provisions, two small pieces of venison. He struck
out for the settlements on the Muskingum, and the first night his
captors passed so near him in pursuit that he might have touched them
in the darkness. Nine days later he came in sight of a station on the
Muskingum, so spent with hunger and fatigue that he could not halloo to
the garrison. He had nothing on his wasted and bleeding body, which was
all torn by briers and brushwood, except a cloth about his loins, and
he was afraid of being mistaken and shot for an Indian. He waited till
nightfall and then crept to the station, where his presence was unknown
till a young man of his acquaintance caught sight of his face in the
firelight, and called out, “Here is ‘Hewit!”
Captain Charles Builderback and his wife were surprised by a party of
Indians while they were looking for cattle in the Ohio country, near
Wheeling, in 1789. Mrs. Builderback hid herself, but the Indians had
captured her husband, and now they forced him to call out to her. She
hesitated to answer, thinking of the children they had left at home in
the cabin which she could see across the river, and knowing how useless
it would be to give herself up. But he called again, saying that if she
surrendered, it might save his life. Then she showed herself, and
was seized and hurried away by one band of savages, while her husband
remained with the others. A few days later these came up and showed her
his scalp: he was one of the assassins of the Gnadenhiitten Indians,
and he was doomed as soon as they knew his name. She was taken to their
towns on the Great Miami, where she lived nine months, drudging with the
squaws and suffering from the rude and filthy life of the savages, but
not ill-treated. Then the commandant at Cincinnati ransomed her and sent
her home to her two orphan children.
So lately as 1812 two little girls were stolen from their fathers’
houses in Preble County by the Indians. They could not be traced, but
twenty-five years later, one of them, named Parker, was found living
with her savage husband in Indiana. She refused then to go home with her
father, saying coldly that she should be ridiculed there for her Indian
customs.
XV. INDIAN HEROES AND SAGES.
The Ohio Indians were of almost as mixed origin as the white people
of Ohio, and if they had qualities beyond those of any other group of
American savages, it was from much the same causes which have given the
Ohioans of our day distinction as citizens. They made the Ohio country
their home by a series of chances, and they defended it against the
French, the English, and Americans in turn, because it had bounds which
seemed to form the natural frontier between them and the Europeans.
It is now believed that before the coming of our race there was a
balance of power between those two great North American nations, the
Iroquois and the Algonquins, and that our wars and intrigues destroyed
this balance, which was never restored, and put an end to all hope of
advance in the native race. Whether this is true or not, it is certain
that the hostilities between the tribes raged down to our day, and
that these seem to have continued if not begun through one family, the
Algonquins, siding with the French, and the other family, the Iroquois,
siding with the English. The Algonquins were most powerful in New
England and Canada, and the Iroquois in New York. Their struggle ended
in the overthrow of the Algonquins in the regions bordering on the
English colonies, where, as has been told, a great branch of that
people who called themselves the Lenni-lenape, and whom we called the
Delawares, dwelt in a sort of vassalage to the Iroquois.
In Ohio, however, these families, so long broken elsewhere by their
feuds, united in a common fear and hate of the white men. Many of the
Ohio Indians were Delawares, but the Miamis were Iroquois, while the
Wyandots again were Hurons, one of the finest and ablest of the Iroquois
nation. They ceased to make war upon each other, and in their union the
strongest traits of both were blended. Their character appears at its’
best, I think, in Tecaughretanego, the adoptive brother of James Smith,
and in the great Mingo chief, Logan.
Of Tecaughretanego, his unselfishness, his piety, his common sense, his
wisdom, we already know something from Smith’s narrative, which I wish
every boy and girl might read; and of Logan’s noble spirit we have had
a glimpse in the story of Kenton’s captivity. He was the son of
Shikellimy, a Cayuga chief who lived at Shamokin, Pennsylvania, and who
named him after James Logan, the Secretary of the Province. Shikellimy
was a convert of the Moravian preachers, and it is thought that Logan
himself was baptized in the Christian faith. He spent the greater
portion of his early life in Pennsylvania, and he took no part in the
war between the French and English, except to do what he could for
peace. When he came to Ohio, he dwelt for a time at Mingo Bottom in
Jefferson County, the rendezvous of the assassins who marched against
Gnadenhiitten under Williamson, and of the assassins who were beaten
back from Sandusky under Crawford. Here, as before, Logan was the friend
of the white man, and it was not till the murder of his father, brother,
and sister, cried to him for vengeance, that he made war upon them.
His kindred were of a small party of Indians whom some Virginians lured
across the Ohio near the mouth of Yellow Creek in 1774. On the Virginia
side the murderers made three of the Indians drunk and tomahawked them,
and when they had tricked the others into discharging their guns at
a mark, and so had them defenseless, they ruthlessly shot them down.
Logan’s sister, who was the only woman in the party, tried to escape,
but a bullet cut short her flight, and she died praying her murderers to
have mercy on the babe she held in her arms. They spared it, and he
who tells the cruel tale saw it the next day in his own mother’s arms
smiling up into her face, while she fed and fondled it.
The news came to Logan while he was speaking at a council of the
Indians, and urging them to make peace with the whites. He instantly
changed his plea; he lifted up his hatchet, and yowed never to lay it
down till he had avenged himself tenfold. He kept his word, and that
summer thirty scalps and prisoners bore witness to his fury.
But it was a short-lived impulse of a nature essentially so good that it
could not long keep the memory of even such an injury. In this very war,
or this out-Durst of the long Indian war, Logan showed himself as before
the friend of the white men. He had pity on many of the captives he
made, and when he could he tried to move other captors to pity. Major
William Robinson, who was one of Logan’s prisoners, tells how he was
surprised, together with two friends, by a party of Indians who fired on
them. Robinson ran with a savage in hot chase behind him, who called
to him in English, “Stop; I won’t hurt you.” “Yes, you will,” Robinson
retorted. “No, I won’t,” the Indian insisted; “but if you don’t stop,
I’ll shoot you.” Robinson fell over a log, and the Indian seized him.
It was Logan, who told him not to be frightened for he should be adopted
into his own tribe when they reached his village. There he was made to
run the gantlet, but Logan instructed him how to manage so that he
got through without harm. Robinson was then tied to the stake and the
Indians prepared to burn him. It was the summer after the murder of
Logan’s kindred, and they had already whipped one Virginian to death
merely because his brother was present at the massacre. They could not
forgive, but Logan rose before the council and pleaded with all his
eloquence for Robinson’s life. Three times the captive was untied
from the stake, and three times tied to it again before Logan’s words
prevailed. At last the great chief was allowed to lay the belt of wampum
on the prisoner for a sign that he was adopted. Then he gave him in
charge to a young Indian, saying, “This is your cousin; you are to go
home with him, and he will take care of you.”
But still the sense of his wrong, and the hunger for revenge, gnawed at
Logan’s heart, and one day he came to Robinson with a piece of paper
and bade him write a letter for him. He said he meant to leave it in
the cabin of a white man which he was going, to attack, and it was
afterwards found there tied to a war club. He made Robinson write
it several times before he thought the words strong enough. It was
addressed to the man whom Logan thought guilty of the death of his
kindred, but who was afterwards known to have been not even present at
their murder.
“Captain Cresap: What did you kill my people on
Yellow Creek for? The white people killed my kin at
Conestoga, a great while ago, and I thought nothing
of that. But you killed my kin again on Yellow Creek,
and took my cousin prisoner. Then I thought I must
kill, too. I have been three times to war since then;
but the Indians are not angry; only myself.
“July 21, 1774.
“Captain John Logan.”
Both the matter and the language of this letter are so like those of
Logan’s famous speech, that it is clear he must often have thought his
wrongs over in the same terms, brooding upon them with an aching
heart, but not with hate so much as grief. The speech was made at the
Chillicothe town where Lord Dunmore treated with the Ohio tribes for
peace in the August after Logan had written his letter, but it was not
spoken in the council. Logan held aloof from the council, and Dunmore
sent to his cabin for him. It is said by some that his messenger was
the great renegade Simon Girty, who had not yet turned against his own
people, and was then, with his friend Simon Kenton, a scout in Dunmore’s
service. Others say that the messenger was a young man named Gibson, but
whoever he was, Logan met him at the door, and coming out into the woods
sat down under a tree which was long known as Logan’s Elm. Here, with a
burst of tears, he told the story of his wrongs in language which cannot
be forgotten as long as men have hearts to thrill for others’ sorrows.
[Illustration: Logan’s Elm 149]
“I appeal to any white man to say if ever he entered Logan’s cabin and
I gave him not meat; if ever he came cold and naked and I gave him
not clothing. During the course of the last long and bloody war Logan
remained in his tent an advocate of peace. Nay, such was my love for the
whites that those of my own country pointed at me as they passed, and
said, ‘Logan is the friend of the white man.’ I had even thought to
live with you but for the injuries of one man. Colonel Cresap, the
last spring, in cold blood and unprovoked, cut off all the relatives of
Logan, not sparing even my women and children. There runs not a drop
of my blood in the veins of any human creature. This called on me for
revenge. I have sought it. I have killed many. I have fully glutted my
vengeance. For my country I rejoice at the beams of peace. Yet do not
harbor the thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear.
He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for
Logan? Not one.”
This speech, or rather this message, which Logan sent to Lord Dunmore,
has come down to us in two forms, one which Dunmore’s officers wrote out
from the report of the message, and one which Thomas Jefferson framed
upon it. They do not differ greatly, and I have given Jefferson’s
version here, because it best expresses the noble mind of a noble man,
a savage, indeed, but far less savage than many of the white men of that
day or any day. A pioneer of Western Pennsylvania, William Brown, who
afterwards became a judge of the Mifflin County courts, calls him “the
best specimen of humanity he ever met with, _white_ or _red_,” He first
saw him in the woods, while stooping to drink at a spring. The figure of
a tall Indian showed itself to him in the water, and he sprang for
his rifle, but the Indian knocked the priming out of his own gun, and
offered his hand. It was Logan, and he guided Brown to the hunting camp
of another white man, with whom he afterwards visited Logan’s camp.
There they all shot at a mark for a dollar each round, and Logan lost.
A deerskin was worth a dollar, and Logan offered five skins for his five
failures. Brown’s friend refused them, saying they were his guests
and had shot with him merely for a trial of skill. Logan answered with
dignity, “Me try to make you shoot your best; me gentlemen, and me take
your dollar if me beat,” and he would not allow the victor even to give
him a horn of powder in return.
A lovely story was told by the daughter of Judge Brown concerning Logan,
who was one day at her father’s camp when her mother happened to regret
that she had no shoes for her little one then just beginning to walk.
Logan said nothing, but shortly after he came and asked the mother to
let the child spend the day with him at his camp. The mother trembled,
but she knew the delicacy of Logan, and she would not wound him by
showing fear of him. He took the child away, and the long hours passed
till nightfall. Then she saw the great chief coming with his tiny
guest through the woods, and the next moment the child bounded into the
mother’s arms, proud and glad to show her feet in the moccasins which
Logan had made for her.
In his old age Logan wandered from place to place, broken by the
misfortunes of his people, and homeless in his own land. He fell a prey
to drink, the enemy of all his race, and he was at last murdered near
Detroit, where, as the story goes, he was sitting by his camp fire, with
his blanket over his head, and lost in gloomy thought, when an Indian
whom he had offended stole upon him and sank his tomahawk in Logan’s
skull.
Of all the Indians he seems to me the grandest because he was the
kindest. Tecaughretanego was wise and good. He had a thoughtful mind and
a serene spirit; he could be just and loving to the white man whom he
had taken for his brother, but he had not so noble an ideal of conduct
as Logan. This chief grasped the notion of friendship with all the
whites; he was more than a tribesman; he imagined what it was to be
a citizen. Among the Ohio men of the past there is no nature more
beautiful, no memory worthier than his. He was a savage, and his thirst
for vengeance, or rather the smoldering thought of his wrongs, lowered
him for a time to the level of the white and red men about him. Yet he
was framed for gentleness, and he surpassed another great Ohio Indian
as much in breadth of character, as he surpassed Tecaughretanego in an
ideal of conduct.